Whispers of Treason: Ottoman Arab Agents and the Collapse of Trust at the End of Empire

On the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire’s traumatic loss of its remaining Balkan possessions shifted its center eastward and placed relations between Istanbul and its Arab territories on center stage. The ruling Committee of Union and Progress, having failed to meet Arab hopes for more autonomy, struggled to counter both rising support for secret political societies among the urban elites of Egypt and Syria and violent flare-ups on the empire’s North African and southern Arabian fringes. This paper proposes a new way of reading this moment, arguing that the erosion of trust is as central as the erosion of territory to understanding the collapse of empire.

How did schisms of trust between the Ottoman state and its citizens become irreparable and destabilizing? The linked trajectories of two lives illuminate the symptoms and consequences of fractures in trust just before the outbreak of war. In 1913, ‘Aziz ‘Ali al-Masri and ‘Izzat al-Jundi were well positioned, multilingual Ottoman (Arab) agents, one a decorated military commander and the other a politically ambitious doctor. By 1914, they were under intense official suspicion. One was tried—the charges against him colored by loud whispers of treason--and saved from the gallows only by a massive public outcry. The other disappeared under mysterious circumstances in 1915. Al-Masri and al-Jundi’s fall from grace, revealed through intimate correspondence and informers’ reports, exposes how attenuated networks of informants and ambiguous loyalties exacerbated Ottoman authorities’ acute fear of betrayal. Although both men were later reborn as nationalist heroes, understanding them through the lens of ethnic nationalism alone is anachronistic. By employing mistrust as a unit of analysis in its own right, this paper aims to recover the uncertainty and apprehension of a liminal moment before the lines of the contemporary Middle East were drawn.